Introduction

The RTCR program was developed to meet two important image writer requirements:

create a large area bitmap at very high resolution in a short time

utilitize substrate measurements to provide correction of the data in real time.

What drives these requirements?

Consider that today's modern image writers for printed circuit boards, IC packages and displays have image areas starting at 600 mm x 600 mm and ranging up to 1500 mm x 2500 mm. At the same time, the DPI for these machines has risen from 4000 DPI to as high as 50,000 DPI. The total number of pixels can be measured in terabytes.

Consider also that the fine lines (5-10 um) coupled with the size of the substrate result the need to account for even tiny dimensional changes in the substrate -- if such changes are not accounted for the data printed onto the substrate will not align with pre-existing vias or layers already present.

In fact, the substrate distortions variations from panel to panel are sufficient that one must actually measure known targets on each substrate after it is loaded into the image writer. Only then can the RIP compute the distortions required to align the data onto that substrate.

While the RIP is building a new bitmap the machine is idle. Therefore throughput is no longer limited by the image writer's ability to "spray" the pixels but becomes a combination of RIP speed and image writer speed.

This is why we called our new software RIP with real time correction.

Principle of Operation

The RTCR achieves its speed by taking the advantage of the fact that most micro-electronic masks contain large amounts of repetition. If that can be extracted then bit copy operations can be used which are much faster than brute force raster computations. READ MORE ...